2010 Research and Design Website Challenge
Held annually in the Fall, the Botball Research and Design Website Challenge explores a different topic in robotics each year. Students are required to research the topic, develop a solution to a related design task, and present the results of their work in the form of a website. Any middle school, high school, home school group, or community organization may enter one team of middle and/or high school students in this contest. One additional entry is allowed for each registered Botball team.
The 2010 Topic: Autonomous Vehicles
Imagine being able to jump into your car, tell it where you want to go, and then sit back and relax (or even sleep!) while your vehicle navigates to your destination. Completely autonomous private vehicles are not yet available to the public, but every year they are less a fantasy from science fiction and more a product from tomorrow’s catalogs and show rooms.
Already, many drivers have surrendered some of their autonomy to technology. Navigation systems, some even connected to streams of live information about traffic and road conditions, have replaced maps and route planning for many drivers [1]. Intelligent precrash systems and new electronic stability controls hit the market in increasing numbers every year to protect us while enroute [2] [3]. Automatic parking systems are available to make sure we end our trips without a scratch when we arrive at our destination. [4]
One German research firm has predicted that there will be almost 1 billion cars on the world’s roads by 2010 [5], and there is no denying the major role that automobiles have played in modern life. By expanding the boundaries of cities and enabling the spread of the suburbs, cars and the infrastructure that supports them have literally shaped the space in which people in developed countries live and work.[6]
Most car trips are uneventful, but in the 3,029,822 million miles that vehicles traveled in the US in 2007 more than 6 million police-reported motor vehicle crashes occurred. With an average cost in property damage of $7,500 per incident, this accounts for a cost of $45 billion. More importantly, 1.71 million of these accidents resulted in an injury, and almost forty thousand resulted in a fatality [7].
And all those millions of miles also take an environmental toll. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, transportation sources like cars account for 29% of domestic green house gas emissions[8]. According to the Department of Energy, transportation, mostly in the form of highway vehicles, used nearly 1/3 of the total energy consumed by the United States.[9]
Driverless cars are on the horizon, but will they make us safer? Will they reduce or increase energy consumption? Help or hurt the environment? How will they change our cities and our lives? Given the huge role that automobiles play in our world, it is reasonable to expect a major advance in automotive technology like the development of autonomous vehicles to have a big impact; but what effects we will see remains an open question.
The 2010 Challenge
In order to get passengers safely to their destinations, autonomous vehicles would need to: use location and map information to plan routes and navigate; use sensors to get information about road conditions, obstacles, and other vehicles; be intelligent enough to react quickly and operate the vehicle safely.
With this in mind, this year’s R&D Website Challenge is to create a website where you:
- Describe the historical development and current state of technology for use in autonomous vehicles including sensors, route planning, and navigation systems.
- Tell us about future directions and goals for these technologies. What advances will have to be made to reach these goals?
- Give us your ideas and designs for creating an autonomous vehicle.
- Discuss some of the possible environmental, social, legal, and safety issues associated with the wide spread adoption of your design.
Here are some issues you may wish to consider in your work:
- Can autonomous vehicles be designed to be fully functional and safe?
- Can these systems be designed to utilize existing roads and vehicles, or will new infrastructure have to be designed as well?
- What advances in sensor and navigation technology will have to be achieved to make autonomous vehicles practical?
- Can these vehicles be designed and produced economically enough so that they are accessible to everyone?
- Who should be liable in the event of an accident involving one or more autonomous vehicles?
- Should there be age restrictions on the use of autonomous vehicles?
Judging:
Websites will be judged by a committee of volunteer experts in fields related to this year’s competition. Judging will be as follows:
- 10% for the website presentation.
- 10% for grammar, readability, and bibliography (proper citations, appropriate listing of sources). Full credit will require at least 5 sources.
- 25% for your description of the history and current state of the art of technology for use in autonomous vehicles.
- 25% for your description of the future direction and goals of these technologies.
- 25% for your explanation of your ideas and designs for creating autonomous vehicles.
- 5% for your discussion of the possible environmental, social, legal, or safety issues associated with your design.
Changes from Previous Years (2008 and before)
After 2008, we made several significant changes to the Research and Design Website Challenge. First, we are no longer requiring that your entries be hosted at teams.kipr.org. Contest entries can be located at any publicly accessible url, just make sure that our judges will be able to access your site from the Internet. (Hosting your website with us is still an option, however. Contact support@kipr.org for more information.)
Second, you are no longer required to register for Botball to participate in the Challenge. Any middle school, high school, home school group, or community organization may enter one team of middle and/or high school students in this contest. One additional entry is allowed for each registered Botball team.
Third, you will use the Botball Team Home Base to submit your entry and additional supporting information.
Finally, the contest dates have all moved up. We’ve released the contest earlier and the deadlines for submission are earlier as well. See the Important Deadlines! section for details.
How to Enter
To enter the contest as a registered Botball team, you will need to log in to the 2010 Botball Team Home Base and follow the instructions for submitting your site. The 2010 Home Base will be online in early October 2009.
To enter the contest without registering for Botball, you will need to register as a Research and Design Contest team to get a team code and password so that you can log in to the Team Home Base. There is no charge associated with registering as a Research and Design Contest team.
To register for just the R&D contest, contact support@kipr.org. NOTE: you only need to do this if you wish to have a contest entry that is not associated with a Botball team.
Important Deadlines!
There are two important deadlines to be aware of this season.
Opt-in and Initial Submission Deadline — Feb 1
The initial deadline is scheduled for Monday, February 1, 2010 at 11:55 pm CST. On or before this date, your team should log in to the Team Home Base and complete the Opt-in and Initial Submission activities.
Final Deadline — Feb 15
After you have met the initial deadline, your team will have until Monday, February 15, 11:55 pm CST to complete your entry. On or before this date, your team should finish development of your website and complete the Final Deadline activities in the Team Home Base.
Awards
This is a national competition divided into middle school and high school divisions. Winners will be announced on the Botball website before the first regional tournament. The winners will be given their awards at their regional tournament award ceremony and will also be acknowledged at the Global Conference on Educational Robotics.
First, second, and third place trophies will be awarded along with a number of honorable mention awards.
The first place team in each division will be given a $1,000 award that can be used as a travel grant to the Global Conference on Educational Robotics to be held in summer of 2010 or as a partial fee waiver towards their 2010 Botball team registration. The second place prize in each division will be a $500 award and the third place prize in each division will be a $250 award. All of these awards can be used either as a travel grant to attend the Global Conference or as a partial fee waiver for their 2010 Botball team registration.
Research and Design Website winners will be automatically accepted to present a paper based on their winning research at the Global Conference on Educational Robotics. These papers will be included in our Global Conference Proceedings.
General Guidelines:
- Any middle school, high school, home school group, or community organization may enter a team of middle and/or high school students in this contest. If you have questions about your groups eligibility, please email support@kipr.org, or call us at 405 579 4609.
- Organizations with a registered Botball team may submit one additional entry per registered team.
- Participation in the R & D Website Challenge is voluntary, and will not affect a team’s standing in any other portion of the Botball program.
- Entries must be publicly available for our judges to review at the time of the entry deadline.
- As part of your entry, you will submit a zip archive containing all of the files for your site through the Team Home Base. This archive should contain an exact copy of your website in its final version. Submitted archives will be examined by the judges in the event of deadline disputes.
- Winning entries will be archived at the KISS Institute website. By entering the contest, you are giving KISS Institute permission to host this copy of your website.
Organizational and Technical Guidelines:
- You must have an index page that contains a clearly labeled Table of Contents that links to each section of your site, including your bibliography. The table of contents may be implemented any way the team desires, but its ease of use will affect your team’s score. Pages that are not directly linked from the table of contents may not be found by the judges.
- Your index page must display your team code in a clearly visible location. We recommend including it in the header or masthead of this page.
- When printed, the entire website (except for bibliography) should print within 10 pages (including all pictures and space for movie displays, etc). Judges will be instructed to judge only that far into the website, considering additional content as supplementary “appendix” material. Your bibliography does not count towards the 10 page limit.
- Your report can include graphics (flash, jpg, or gif files), small videos (flash, Quicktime or mpg), and audio (flash or mp3).
- Bear in mind that our judges may be accessing your site using a variety of different kinds of network connections, including dialup. In the past, some judges have had trouble with sites that included large multimedia files.
- Content that requires browser plug-ins (like Flash ) is allowed, if those plug-ins are available for both the Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
- Any plug-ins required to view your site must be listed on your index page, along with information on downloading those plug-ins. No plug-ins, except for Flash, should be needed to view the index page.
- Judges will use a variety of computers and browsers - do not use anything in your web page that can only be viewed using a specific operating system or browser.
- At minimum, your website must be viewable using Internet Explorer 6, and either Safari 2.0 or Firefox 2.0
- If you are unsure whether or not your page is compatible, email support@kipr.org with a subject line: “R & D Contest Test” and let us know:
- Your team number
- What operating system and internet browsers you have already checked
- What specifically you want us to check. (e.g., does this link work? or can you see that figure? or do you hear the theme to Rocky when the page comes up?).
- One way to help make sure that your site will work correctly with most web browsers is to check that you have correctly followed the relevant web standards.
Website Bibliography Guidelines
Your entry’s bibliography should follow the following guidelines:
- Your website must contain original content created only by the students on the website team. (For Botball teams, these need not be the same students who build and program the robots.)
- You must properly acknowledge the creators of work on which your website material is based.
- Material copied from other sources must be properly quoted and immediately followed with a hyperlink, or bibliographic reference to the source material at the conclusion of the quote.
- Material that is substantially drawn from a single source (i.e., paraphrased) should be followed by a hyperlink, or bibliographic reference to the source material.
- Sources used to supply facts or ideas that are used in your content should be acknowledged through a hyperlink, or bibliographic reference to the source material.
- Graphics, videos and pictures not created by the website team should be immediately followed by a hyperlink, or bibliographic reference to the source of the material.
- All sources used in the creation of your website (including those already referenced in the text) should be included in a bibliography page on your website.
- The motivation section of these rules with the bibliography is an example of a correct way to do bibliographic citation.
- A link to your bibliography must appear on your website index.
- The bibliography does not count against the judging page limit (do not skimp on the bibliography).
- Wikipedia is a valuable resource for researchers, but it is not a primary source. You may use Wikipedia to start your research, but look at the Wikipedia article’s bibliography and read through the original source. Once you have done that, cite the original source. If a Wikipedia article does not have a bibliography, then you can use it as a primary source, but keep in mind that anyone can write a Wikipedia article, and without original sources to check, you should question the article’s accuracy (we will!).
- Any website not containing a bibliography or containing non-original material that is not properly attributed, will be disqualified from the contest.
- Please keep in mind that when it comes to judging your websites, 200 bibliographic sources are not necessarily better then 50 sources. However, 5 bibliographic sources are better then 1.
Bibliography
1 — Financial Express: On Your Way With Trusty GPS < http://www.financialexpress.com/news/on-your-way-with-trusty-gps/505277/>
2 — IEEE Spectrum: Keeping Cars from Crashing < http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/keeping-cars-from-crashing >
3 — ChooseESC: General Information about ESC <http://www.chooseesc.org/en/facts_about_electronic_stability_control/general_information_about_esc/ >
4 — BBC: Self-parking car hits the shops <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3198619.stm >
5 — Motor Authority: One Billion Cars on the Road by 2010 < http://www.motorauthority.com/blog/1025522_one-billion-cars-on-the-road-by-2010
6 — Lots of parking: land use in a car culture By John A. Jakle, Keith A. Sculle
7 — National Safety Council: Estimating the Cost of Unintentional Injuries <http://www.nsc.org/resources/issues/estcost.aspx>
8 — EPA: Transportation and Climate < http://www.epa.gov/otaq/climate/basicinfo.htm >
9 — Center for Transportation Analysis: Transportation Energy Data Book <http://www-cta.ornl.gov/data/chapter2.shtml>